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Sunday, March 06, 2016

Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy?

"There’s no doubt that Bill Nye “the Science Guy” is extremely
intelligent. But it seems that, when it comes to philosophy, he’s
completely in the dark." reportsOlivia Goldhill, Weekend writer.

He's an expert on science—but not philosophy.(Reuters/ Andrew Kelly)

The beloved American science educator and TV
personality posted a video last week where he responded to a question
from a philosophy undergradabout whether philosophy is a “meaningless topic.”

The video, which made the entire US philosophy
community collectively choke on its morning espresso, is hard to watch,
because most of Nye’s statements are wrong. Not just kinda wrong, but
deeply, ludicrously wrong. He merges together questions of consciousness
and reality as though they’re one and the same topic, and completely
misconstrues Descartes’ argument “I think, therefore I am”—to mention
just two of many examples.

And Nye—arguably America’s favorite
“edutainer”—is not the only popular scientist saying “meh” to the entire
centuries-old discipline. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has claimed
philosophy is not “a productive contributor to our understanding of the
natural world”; while theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking declared that “philosophy is dead.”

It’s
shocking that such brilliant scientists could be quite so ignorant, but
unfortunately their views on philosophy are not uncommon. Unlike many
other academic subjects (mathematics and history, for example), where
non-experts have some vague sense of the field’s practices, there seems
to be widespread confusion about what philosophy entails.

In Nye’s case, his misconceptions are too large
and many to show why each and every one is flawed. But several of his
comments in the video speak to broader confusions about philosophy. So
let’s clear up some of those:

“It often gets back to this question: What is the nature of consciousness?”

Here is Nye’s full quote, on what he sees as philosophy’s main preoccupations:

“It often gets back to this question:
What is the nature of consciousness? Can we know that we know? Are we
aware that we’re aware? Are we not aware that we’re aware? Is reality
real? Or is reality not real and we’re all living on a ping pong ball
that’s part of a giant interplanetary ping pong game that we cannot
sense? These are interesting questions.”

Nye’s remarks, which conflate ideas from
completely different areas of philosophy, are a caricature based on the
common misconception that philosophy is about asking pointlessly “deep”
questions, plucking an answer out of thin air, and then drinking some
pinot noir and writing a florid essay.

But ping pong inside, these actually are
interesting questions—and far from idle musing, the methods of
analyzing such topics are incredibly, mind-achingly rigorous. Each of
the questions Nye asks is the subject of extensive study, and
philosophy, at its core, involves highly critical thinking.

“The idea that reality is not real, that what you sense and feel is not authentic, is something I’m very skeptical of.”

Nye’s skepticism
is an empty response to the question of whether we can trust our senses.
“If you drop a hammer on your foot, is it real?” he asks. “Or is it
just your imagination?” Then he goes on to suggest that the young
philosophy student explore the question by dropping a hammer on his own
foot. But such a painful experiment would not actually address
the underlying question, and this approach—simply mocking the argument
rather than addressing it—is so infamous that, as CUNY philosophy
professor Kaikhosrov Irani points out on his blog, it has its own name: argumentum ad lapidem—”appeal to a stone.”

Nye’s confidence that what we sense and feel is
“authentic” is particularly strange coming from a scientist, given that
several advanced scientific discoveries do in fact contradict
information we receive from our senses. Einstein discovered that there’s
no such thing as absolute simultaneity, for example, while quantum
physics shows that an object can be in two places at the same time.
Several philosophers have long argued that our senses are not a reliable
means of evaluating reality, and such scientific discoveries support
the idea that we should treat sensory information with a little
skepticism.Read more...

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.